Was outside earlier, snow flurries falling around me. I watched Fozzie tentatively sniff at a pile of frozen poop (his own, from earlier in the day), trying to decide if he wanted to eat it. (He did, but I ran over and cleaned it up first, stealing his “treat” from him.) I looked up and saw a flock of birds moving southwards across the gray sky.
Gray and cold, cold and gray. This time of year in Ohio is my least favorite. Dark by 5pm and, if you’re lucky, maybe a few errant rays of sunshine during the day. Here in the midwest, a sense of gloom haunts the landscape like the world’s most depressed ghost. Even my SAD lamp seems like it would prefer to hibernate until it’s time to go on spring break. There’s a reason why — at least in pre-pandemic times — I travel to San Diego every March, so that I have something to look forward to, to motivate me to just get through January and February.
I thought a return to San Diego might be in the cards this spring, but with Robert Ludlum’s The Omicron Variant still wending its way through the world, that seems less and less likely. So since I can’t change the fact that I am cursed to be living in interesting times, I’m instead working on changing the things I do have control over — like my mindset when it comes to the winter months. To accept them for what they are — just a season — and perhaps even try to find some joy in them. I turn 40 in a few months, and while I don’t feel old — hell, I barely feel like a grown-up (whatever that is) most days — I am becoming increasingly aware that the desire to skip ahead of the coming days, weeks, months and arrive at some vague, future endpoint, where things may not necessarily be better, and could possibly be worse, is maybe not how I should want to spend my life. And that means focusing more on the here and now, even if I really don’t feel like it some days.
So how’s all that going, you, my imaginary interlocutor, might ask? It remains a work in progress — but it’s going.
(003/365)
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